Sometimes he composed for twenty-four hours without stopping—never mind the endless noise from the crowded muddy street outside his windows—then fell down from exhaustion to sleep over the piano itself in a stupor.

Then Lestat in those shining white gloves and with that glistening silver walking stick was there blazing before him, face moist and cheeks ruddy.

“Here, get up now, Antoine. You’ve slept enough. Play for me.”

“Why do you believe in me?” he’d asked.

“Play!” Lestat pointed to the piano keys.

Lestat danced in circles as Antoine played, looking up into the smoky light of the crystal chandelier. “That’s it, more, that’s it …”

And then Lestat himself would flop down into the gold fauteuil behind the desk and begin writing with superb speed and accuracy the notes that Antoine was playing. What had happened to all those songs, all those sheets of parchment, all those leather folders of music?

How lovely it had been, those candlelight hours, curtains blowing in the wind and sometimes people gathered on the banquette below to listen to his playing.

Until that awful night when Lestat had come to demand his allegiance.

Scarred, filthy, dressed in rags that reeked of the swamp, Lestat had become a monster. “They tried to kill me,” he’d said in a harsh whisper. “Antoine, you must help me!”

Not the precious child, Claudia, not the precious friend, Louis de Pointe du Lac! You cannot mean this. Murderers, those two, the picture-perfect pair who glided through the early evenings as if in some shared dream as they walked the new flagstone pavements?

Then as this ragged and crippled creature had fastened itself to Antoine’s throat, Antoine had seen it all in visions, seen the crime itself, seen his lover savaged again and again by the monster child’s knife, seen Lestat’s body dumped into the swamp, seen him rise. Antoine now knew everything. The Dark Blood had rushed into his body like a burning fluid exterminating every human particle in its path. The music, his own music, rose in his ears in dizzying volume. Only music could describe this ineffable power, this raging euphoria.

They had been defeated, both of them, when they went against Claudia and Louis—and Antoine had been hideously burned. That is how Antoine learned what it meant to be Born to Darkness. You could suffer burns like that and endure. You could suffer what should have meant death for a human being, and you could go on. Music and pain, they were the twin mysteries of his existence. Even the Dark Blood itself did not obsess him as did music and pain. As he lay on the four-poster beside Lestat, Antoine saw his pain in bright flashing colors, his mouth open in a perpetual moan. I cannot live like this. And yet he didn’t want to die, no, never to die, not even now, not even with the craving for human blood driving him out into the night though his body was nothing but pain, pain scraped by the fabric of his shirt, his trousers, even his boots. Pain and blood and music.

For thirty mortal years, he’d lived like a monster, hideous, scarred, preying on the weakest of mortals, hunting in the crowded Irish immigrant slums for his meals. He could make his music without ever touching the keys of a piano. He heard the music in his head, heard it surge and climb as he moved his fingers in the air. The mingled noises of the rat-infested slums, the roaring laughter from a stevedore’s tavern, became a new music to him, caught in the low rumble of voices to the right and to the left, or the cries of his victims. Blood. Give me blood. Music I will possess forever.

Lestat had gone to Europe, chasing after them, those two, Claudia and Louis, who had been his family, his friends, his lovers.

But he had been terrified to attempt such a journey. And he had left Lestat at the docks. “Goodbye to you, Antoine.” Lestat had kissed him. “Maybe you will have a life here in the New World, the life I wanted.” Gold and gold and gold. “Keep the rooms, keep the things I’ve given you.”

But he hadn’t been clever like Lestat. He’d had no skill for living like a mortal among mortals. Not with these songs in his head, these symphonies, and the blood ever beckoning. His own legacy he’d squandered, and Lestat’s gold was gone too at last, though where or how he could never remember. He had left New Orleans, journeying north, sleeping in the cemeteries as he made his way.

In St. Louis he’d begun to actually play again. It was the strangest thing. Most of his scars were gone by then. He no longer looked infected and contagious with some disfiguring disease.

It was as if he’d waked from a dream, and for years the violin was his instrument, and he even played for money at mortal gatherings, and managed to become a gentleman again, with clean linen and a small apartment with paintings, a brass clock, and a wooden closet of fine clothes. But all that had come to nothing. He felt loneliness, despair. The world seemed empty of monsters like himself.

He’d wandered out west, why he didn’t know. By the 1880s, he’d been playing the piano in the Barbary Coast vice dens of San Francisco and hunting the seamen for blood. He worked his way up from the sailors’ saloons to the fancy melodeons and the French and Chinese parlor houses, glutting himself on the riffraff in dark streets where murder was rampant.

Gradually he came to realize the quality parlor houses loved him, even the finest of them, and he was soon surrounded by admiring ladies of the evening, who were a comfort to him, and therefore immune from his murderous thirst.

In the Chinatown brothels, he fell in love with the sweet tender exotic slave girls who delighted in his music.

And finally, in the great music halls, he heard applause for the songs he wrote on the spot, and his dizzying improvisations. He was back in the world again. He was loving it. Dressed like a dandy, he put pomade in his dark hair, clenched a small cheroot between his teeth, and lost himself in the ivory keys, intoxicated by the adulation all around him.

But other vampires crept into his bloody paradise—the first he’d seen since Lestat set sail from the New Orleans docks.

Powerful males, clad in brocade vests and fancy frock coats, obviously using their skills to cheat at cards and dazzle their victims, cast a cold eye on him and threatened him before fleeing themselves. In the dark streets of Chinatown he ran up against a Chinese blood drinker in a long dark coat and black hat who threatened him with a hatchet.

Though he longed desperately to know these vampire strangers—though he longed to trust them, talk with them, share the story of his journey with them—he left San Francisco in terror.

He left behind the pretty waiter girls and courtesans who’d sustained him with their sweet friendship and the easy pickings of the drunken men.